Visualization and quantitative study in bibliographic databases: A case in the field of university–industry cooperation

•Our visualization and quantitative method formed a new research framework to evaluate the performance of some research areas.•Our method can clearly reveal the key elements of certain discipline.•The relationships among the important cited authors, references, journals and keywords can be explained visually.•It should be noted that the potential problems and evolutionary trends of certain research field such as university–industry cooperation can also be found out via our method.

CiteSpace is a visual document analysis software, by which performances and trends of certain disciplines can be displayed for a given period. Moreover, the evolution of a frontier research can be explored by such software as well. This research focuses on the visualization and quantitative study in bibliographic databases by taking the university–industry collaboration studies as an example. Using the Web of Science (WOS), 587 publications and over 30,000 references were selected for analysis, which produced the following results: (1) Our method can clearly reveal the key elements of certain disciplines, such as the largest share of publications, the most frequently cited authors and journals in the university–industry cooperation research field; (2) The relationships among the frequently cited authors, references, journals and keywords can be explained visually in the university–industry cooperation research field; (3) Of special note is that the potential problems and evolutionary trends of certain research fields such as university–industry cooperation can also be ascertained via our method; (4) In general, according to the case study, our visualization and quantitative method evolved a new research framework to evaluate the performance of some research areas.